Tag: Digital Growth Fund

Wealthy investors will pay just about anything to invest in Facebook and Twitter. JPMorgan (JPM) and Goldman Sachs (GS) are finding ways to make it happen.

Shortly after Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. (NYSE:GS) announced it was selling $1 billion in Facebook shares to its foreign clients, news leaked that JPMorgan Chase & Co. (NYSE:JPM) was raising cash, too, for its so-called J.P. Morgan Digital Growth Fund LP. A few weeks later, the Digital Growth Fund is sitting on a treasure chest filled with $1.2 billion. And it’s looking to deploy that cash for stakes in late-stage, pre-IPO social media companies.

Twitter sits in the crosshairs. Negotiations are ongoing, but it sounds like JPM’s pushing for a minority stake in Twitter, which could value the site at $4.5 billion, according to the Financial Times.

Talk about a steep valuation. Debra Williamson of eMarketer estimates Twitter could generate just $150 million in revenue in 2011, according to the Wall Street Journal. Compare that to Facebook, which could generate as much as $4 billion.

With a valuation around 100 times the company’s revenues, JPM will probably lobby for Twitter to put itself up for sale. A partnership with a site like Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) could give Twitter the cash and time it needs to roll out a viable, long-term business model. And no one suggests such a thing will be easy.

While Twitter’s got 175 million “registered accounts,” eMarketer believes that only 16 million or so of those accounts are actually active. Still, it’s difficult to put a price-tag on a site that’s among the Top 10 most-visited Web sites in the world (per Alexa). It shares that honor with Web superpowers like Baidu.com, Youtube.com and Google.com.

Twitter’s reach makes it difficult to slap a pricetag on, even if the site’s “only” generating $150 million a year. The fact of the matter is, investors probably won’t care. The hottest companies in the tech sphere are all privately-owned. And we all want a piece of something the rest of the public can’t touch. Wealthy investors will pay just about anything for that honor, and JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs are finding ways to make it happen.